Opinion | In praise of the Donald Trump playbook, which will help the US score a victory over China, albeit temporarily

Robert Delaney says Donald Trump deserves some credit for his China policies, which may well see Xi Jinping make concessions to the US at the G20 this week. Not that it means the US will succeed in keeping China down, though

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US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer holds a “Trump Playbook” document as he stands behind US President Donald Trump at a White House news conference. Photo: Reuters

Published: 1:34am, 27 Nov 2018Updated: 2:56pm, 27 Nov 2018

US President Donald Trump deserves some credit when it comes to his approach to China. For most people outside his base, this might be a challenging assertion. They will need to block out how Trump has debased the White House by saying lucrative arms deals with Saudi Arabia should excuse what was likely to have been a state-sanctioned killing. They must also forget for a moment his willingness to hasten potentially catastrophic climate change by deregulating the fossil fuel industry.

Once these blinkers are on, however, we can give Trump a thumbs up for the game of chicken he is playing with Beijing. After all, most analysts expect his counterpart, President Xi Jinping, to offer a concession or two when they meet in Buenos Aires this week.

Whatever Xi brings to the table will not be enough to return Sino-American relations to the relative stability of the few decades before Trump took office, but it should be more substantive than anything Beijing has offered since joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001.

The strategy Trump used to get whatever Xi will offer didn’t involve informed statecraft. It came from his one-page playbook for every challenge he faces: demand a better deal and hold everyone on all sides hostage until he can claim he has evened the score.

Trump has no apparent exit strategy for the trade war and seems content to let American multinationals figure out how to re-engineer complex global supply chains involving China, and so many resist the argument that he should be praised for his contretemps with Beijing.

Critics might also argue that the path to victory in Trump’s stand-off with China would have been easier had he not spent his first year in office antagonising America’s closest allies and trading partners. But none of this should detract from the fact that the moves made by Barack Obama, George W. Bush and all of the supposedly astute policymakers guiding their approach to Beijing amounted to a win-lose scenario in China’s favour.

It’s true that many American consumers and shareholders benefited from closer bilateral ties, but from a long-term strategic perspective, how do cheaper sweatshirts and fatter Boeing dividends compare with the broader-based rewards that could have been reaped if American companies had the kind of access to China’s market that Chinese companies have to America’s?

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